When Monday Feels Like Drowning

It’s 6:47 AM on a Monday and I’m standing in my kitchen holding a mug of coffee I forgot to pour.

The Keurig is blinking. I didn’t even press the button. My cat is screaming at her food bowl like I personally starved her for a decade. And my Slack notifications have been going off since 5:30 AM because my coworker in Berlin doesn’t believe in time zones.

I haven’t even put on real pants yet.

Does anyone else feel like Monday doesn’t just arrive — it crashes through the ceiling like a wrecking ball? Like the weekend was a fever dream and suddenly you’re back in the fluorescent lighting of your open-plan office wondering where the last 48 hours went?

I keep asking myself that. Every single Monday.

So I tried something different this week. I woke up at 6 instead of 6:30. Gave myself an “extra” 30 minutes. I thought maybe if I had a buffer, the drowning feeling would slow down. Spoiler: it didn’t. I just spent those 30 minutes doom-scrolling Reddit, watching a guy restore a rusty axe on TikTok, and staring at the ceiling fan occasionally glancing at my phone hoping for a reason to call in sick. I didn’t find one.

Why does Monday feel heavier than every other day of the week combined?

I think it’s because Sunday night is a lie. You tell yourself “I’ll prep my lunch, lay out my clothes, maybe journal a little.” And then Sunday afternoon hits and you’re on the couch watching three hours of some true crime doc about a woman who poisoned her husband with eyedrops, and suddenly it’s 11 PM and you’ve achieved nothing. The lunch is unmade. The clothes are still in the dryer making that thump-thump noise. The journal is somewhere in a drawer with three entries from 2022, all of which start with “Today I want to be better.” So Monday morning you wake up already behind. Already in the hole. Already trying to climb out of something you didn’t even fall into.

That’s where the drowning starts. Not at 9 AM when you open your laptop. At 6:47 AM when you’re standing in your kitchen in your underwear holding an empty mug wondering if it’s even worth turning on the Keurig if you’re already this tired. The Keurig, by the way, costs about $89 on Amazon. I bought it in March 2024 thinking it would fix my mornings. It has not fixed my mornings. It has only made them more complicated because now there’s a machine I have to remember to load.

The 7:15 train to Manhattan is the worst part. I take the LIRR from Long Island and the parking lot at the station looks like a graveyard of corporate zombies shuffling toward the platform. Everyone’s got the same face — the “please don’t talk to me, I’m conserving every ounce of willpower to not quit on the platform” face. I make eye contact with this woman every Monday at the same exact spot near the bench by the newspaper box. We never speak. We just nod. Sometimes she has a green tea. Sometimes I have a half-drunk cold brew from the 7-Eleven that cost me $4.29 because I forgot to bring my travel mug. It’s weirdly the most honest relationship I have in my entire life right now, and I don’t even know her name. I think about that a lot. Two strangers holding eye contact once a week and saying nothing and meaning everything.

Last Monday I missed the 7:15 because the 7:00 was delayed. I was standing on the platform watching the departure board flip from 7:00 to 7:08 to 7:12 to “see website” and my chest started doing that thing. That tight, “I can’t breathe right” thing. Not a panic attack, I don’t think. Just my body going “hey, this is bad, this is not okay, you’re standing on a cold platform at 7 AM and you’re already failing the day.” I texted my manager “running 10 min late, train issue” and she replied with a thumbs up emoji. Just the thumb. No face. No words. Just the thumb. I stared at that thumb emoji for way too long. Like maybe if I looked at it hard enough it would turn into a real sentence. It did not.

I sat down on a bench and put my head in my hands for about 90 seconds. A guy in a Mets jersey walked past me and said “rough one, huh?” without stopping. I said “yeah” without looking up. That was the whole interaction. We both moved on. He had his own Monday. I had mine. We didn’t need to compare notes.

This is the part I can’t really explain to people who don’t commute. The Monday drowning isn’t just about work. It’s the logistics. The alarm that went off too early. The shower that was too short because you forgot to wash your hair. The breakfast you ate over the sink in three bites. The keys you couldn’t find for 11 minutes even though they’re always on the hook by the door. The traffic that appeared out of nowhere on the LIE for no reason. The coworker who wants to “circle back” on something that could be a Slack message in 30 seconds. The lunch you brought but didn’t have time to eat, so now it’s just a sad tupperware in the office fridge with your name on it in Sharpie. The 3 PM crash where you consider quitting three different jobs and also moving to a small town in Vermont where no one has ever sent a calendar invite. The 5:30 meeting that “should only take 15 minutes” but goes to 6:15 because Kevin had a “quick thought” that turned into a 22-minute monologue about Q3 alignment. The train home where everyone’s silent and sweaty and nobody makes eye contact. The grocery store you have to stop at because you have no food in the apartment except half a bag of shredded cheese and a sad onion. The frozen pizza you toss in the oven at 8:02 PM. The couch you collapse onto at 8:47 PM. The realization that you do this again in 4 days. That’s the Monday. That’s the whole thing. Every single week. Like a hamster wheel made of Outlook and sadness.

I tried explaining this to my mom on Sunday. I called her and said “I think I need a mental health day on Monday” and she went “just push through it, everybody feels like that on Monday, sweetie. You just need to get back into the swing of things.” And I’m like, mom, I’m not asking for permission. I’m telling you I’m drowning. But I didn’t say that. I just said “yeah, you’re right” and changed the subject to her garden and the weird mole situation. She’s been dealing with a mole for three weeks. I can hear about the mole. The mole is fine. The mole is not the problem. The problem is that I told my mother I was not okay and she responded with a platitude.

That’s another thing about Monday drowning. You can’t even complain about it. Because if you do, someone will tell you to “try yoga” or “go to bed earlier” or “just be grateful you have a job” or “have you tried journaling.” And they’re not wrong, exactly. But they’re also not helping. They’re just adding to the noise. It’s like being in a pool and someone on the deck is yelling “you should really learn to swim better” while you’re actively going under.

I’m 28. I have a job I don’t hate. I have an apartment I can afford (barely, with two roommates, but still). I have a cat who loves me when it’s not 6:30 AM. I have parents who are healthy. I have friends I text back eventually. By every metric I’m doing fine. I have savings, I have a 401(k), I have a Peloton I used for two months. But on Monday morning at 7:15, standing on the platform with my work badge swinging from my lanyard, watching the 7:12 train get cancelled in real time on the overhead board, I want to lie down on the concrete and just stop. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a “I need help” way. Just in a “what if I just laid here for 11 minutes and nobody said anything” way.

I never do. I get on the train. I make small talk with the conductor about the weather. I open my laptop at my desk at 8:47 AM. I drink my second coffee, the first one having gone cold on the train because I forgot it in the cupholder. I smile at people in the elevator. I answer my emails. I do the work.

But the drowning doesn’t go away. It just gets quieter. It sits in the back of my head like a low hum, like a fridge you can’t quite turn off, like tinnitus but worse because at least tinnitus doesn’t ask you to attend a meeting at 5:30. It waits. It waits for the 2:30 PM lull where you open Zillow and look at houses in Maine you can’t afford, just to imagine a life where no one has ever sent a calendar invite on a Monday. It waits for the 4 PM where you start calculating how many hours until you can leave without anyone noticing. It waits for the train home, where the same zombies are in the same seats doing the same scroll on the same phones.

Last week I had a Monday where I actually cried in the bathroom at work. Not dramatic, no sobs, just standing at the sink with cold water on my face trying to get my eyes to look less red before the 10 AM standup. My coworker Erin knocked on the door and asked “you okay in there?” I said “yeah, allergies, sorry.” She said “okay” and walked away. I appreciated that more than she will ever know. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want a wellness check. I didn’t want a Slack message from HR asking if I needed resources. I just wanted 90 seconds alone in a place where no one would ask me to perform okay-ness. Erin got it. Erin understood the assignment. I sent her a $10 Starbucks gift card the next day with a note that said “for understanding the bathroom” and she sent back a single purple heart emoji. We are not close. But we are bonded.

I wonder how many people are doing this right now. At 7:15 AM. On a Monday. Standing in a bathroom stall or a parking garage or a subway platform or their car in the driveway with the engine off, just trying to remember how to breathe. Millions, probably. I bet if you looked at the HR analytics at any major company, Mondays at 7 AM have the highest rate of “out sick” calls and “late” Slack messages. We’re all sick. We’re just sick of the same thing. We just don’t have a name for it that doesn’t sound ungrateful.

I don’t have an answer for it. I don’t have a productivity hack or a meditation app recommendation or a “5 morning routines that changed my life” list. I don’t have a link to buy something for $12.99 that will fix this. I have nothing. I have a Keurig that won’t cooperate, a cat who hates me before 7 AM, and a train that’s probably going to be delayed again. I have a job that pays me enough to live in Long Island but not enough to stop feeling like every Monday is a personal attack from the universe. I have a Slack full of unread messages from Berlin.

I just know that the feeling is real, and it’s heavy, and it’s every single week, and nobody talks about it because talking about it makes you “that person” at work who everyone tiptoes around. So we all just nod at each other on the platform and pretend the train is going to come on time. We all just say “happy Monday” in the elevator with the fakest smile we’ve ever manufactured. We all just type “thanks!” in Slack when our manager sends a thumbs up emoji. We all just go to the bathroom when we need to fall apart for 90 seconds.

So if you’re reading this and you’re also in the middle of it — at your desk, on your train, in your car, in your kitchen, hiding in a bathroom stall, scrolling your phone before you “start” your day, standing on a platform with a work badge swinging from your lanyard — I guess I’m just saying I see you. Not in a cheesy way. Not in a “you got this” way. Not in a “treat yourself to a nice latte” way. Not in a “have you tried gratitude journaling” way. Just in a “yeah, this sucks, and I’m in it too, and I don’t have any advice but I also feel like I’m losing my mind a little bit and I think that’s actually fine” way.

I’ll probably write another one of these next Monday. Because the train leaves at 7:15 again, and my cat will be screaming at 6:30, and my Slack will be pinging from Berlin at 5:30 AM, and I’ll forget to press the Keurig button, and the parking lot will be full of the same zombies, and the woman by the newspaper box will nod at me, and the departure board will lie to me, and my chest will do the tight thing, and my manager will send a thumb emoji, and the drowning will start again like it always does, like a tide, like a tax, like a thing I have to survive every seven days.

I’m not even going to pretend I have a punchline.

It’s just Monday. It’s just every Monday. It’s just the price of having a job and a life and a Keurig that costs $89 and a cat named Potato who screams at 6:30 AM like she’s being murdered. It’s just the deal. I don’t know who made the deal. I don’t know how to renegotiate it.

Okay. Back to work.

Wait, no. It’s not 9 AM yet. I’m still on the train.

I lied. Back to pretending to work. Back to the inbox. Back to the 47 unread emails that all say “quick question” but none of them are quick. Back to the 3 PM crash. Back to the 5:30 meeting. Back to the frozen pizza. Back to the couch at 8:47 PM. Back to the realization.

Actually, one of the emails is from my boss and the subject line is “when you have a sec” which is office code for “this is going to ruin your day and also the next three.” Cool. Cool cool cool. I haven’t had a sec. I haven’t had a sec since 2009.

See you next Monday. Or maybe in the bathroom at 10:14 AM. Or maybe on the platform at 7:15. Whichever comes first.

I lied. I won’t see you. You’ll just be another zombie in the parking lot, and I’ll be another zombie in the parking lot, and we’ll all just nod at each other and pretend the train is going to come on time.

It won’t. But we’ll wait anyway.

[“Monday Burnout”, “Commuter Vent”, “LIRR Platform”, “Free Read”, “Gen Z Millennial”]